June 24, 2020

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent non-profit newspaper by and for the South Side of Chicago. We provide high-quality, critical arts and public interest coverage, and equip and develop journalists, photographers, artists, and mediamakers of all backgrounds.

Volume 7, Issue 19 Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Serrato Managing Editors Martha Bayne Sam Stecklow Deputy Editor Jasmine Mithani Senior Editors Julia Aizuss Christian Belanger Mari Cohen Christopher Good Rachel Kim Emeline Posner Adam Przybyl Olivia Stovicek Politics Editor Jim Daley Education Editors Ashvini Kartik-Narayan Michelle Anderson Literature Editor Davon Clark Nature Editor Sam Joyce Food & Land Editor Sarah Fineman Contributing Editors Mira Chauhan Joshua Falk Lucia Geng Robin Vaughan Jocelyn Vega Tammy Xu Jade Yan Staff Writer

AV Benford

Data Editor Jasmine Mithani Radio Exec. Producer Erisa Apantaku Social Media Editors Grace Asiegbu, Arabella Breck, Maya Holt Director of Fact Checking: Tammy Xu Fact Checkers: Abigail Bazin, Susan Chun, Maria Maynez, Sam Joyce, Elizabeth Winkler, Lucy Ritzmann, Kate Gallagher, Matt Moore, Malvika Jolly, Charmaine Runes Visuals Editor Mell Montezuma Deputy Visuals Editors Siena Fite,

Sofie Lie, Shane Tolentino Photo Editor Keeley Parenteau Staff Photographers: milo bosh, Jason Schumer Staff Illustrators: Siena Fite, Katherine Hill Layout Editors Haley Tweedell, Davon Clark Webmaster Managing Director

Pat Sier Jason Schumer

The Weekly is produced by a mostly all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring.

Over the summer we publish every other week.

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IN CHICAGO The 155th Juneteenth Last week, the City Council passed a resolution to recognize the 19th of June as a day to celebrate the end of slavery in the United States, but it stopped short of declaring it a paid holiday like other cities have done. In February, North Side Ald. Maria Hadden (49th), with the support of forty other aldermen, introduced an ordinance that would make Juneteenth Day an official holiday. But in a gesture that people didn't exactly expect from the first Black woman mayor, Lori Lightfoot said the city couldn't afford to make Juneteenth a city holiday (the cost could be $100 million). In a turn of events, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said he would work with the legislature to make Juneteeth a state holiday. The Black community held their own celebrations that included patronizing Black restaurants in recovery and a car caravan that took off in the West Side, made stops on the DuSable Bridge on Michigan Ave. and other historic locations, and ended at the Pullman Porter Museum in the South Side.

Community oversight of the police Protesters outside City Hall were so loud that the mayor had to momentarily mute last week's virtual City Council meeting. Activists have been demanding community control of the police through an elected body known as Chicago Police Accountability Council (CPAC) that would replace the mayorappointed Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA). Lightfoot has responded by forming a twenty-member task force, which includes community members, experts, and activists, to review CPD's use of force.

Critics say CPAC—unlike COPA or the task force—would actually have the power to determine the police budget and hire and fire the police chief.

Working in tandem are activists who are demanding that Chicago Public Schools terminate their $33 million contract with CPD and remove officers from schools altogether, as well as student activists who partook in a nineteenhour sit-in on June 13 to call for disbanding the University of Chicago’s campus police—the largest private police force in Chicago.

New funds for struggling tenants and business owners Last week, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced a $900 million package of grants to help struggling businesses, renters, and homeowners. The plan includes $60 million to support Illinois businesses, which includes $20 million specifically earmarked for businesses that suffered damage due to looting in the aftermath of protests against the killing of George Floyd. The package also designated $300 million, to be disbursed in August, to help the estimated one in three Illinoisans struggling to pay rent or make mortgage payments. On Saturday, Mayor Lightfoot announced that the city’s $15 million “Together Now” fund has begun taking applications from small businesses that have suffered economic distress or property damage in recent months; the deadline to apply is Monday, June 29, and grants to 2,500 qualifying businesses will be awarded by lottery. See chicago.gov/togethernow or cct.org/togethernow.

IN THIS ISSUE comic: do i go back to my day job post-quarantine

kayla ginsburg..................................................2 the nonprofit case to defund the police

Now is the time to fully fund social services in the name of public safety jackie rosa.........................................................4 chicago’s overpoliced neighborhoods will remain

“occupied”

until the city defunds cpd

Simon Balto’s history of police in Black Chicago shows why CPD can’t be reformed bobby vanecko...................................................5 sitting ducks

“Leaving people in the jail, I would argue, is leaving people to die” kiran misra........................................................7 a mother’s investigation

“The way they talked to a grieving mother just says it all about how they regard Black people as a whole.” amy qin..............................................................9 community policy, community health

Jonathan Foiles’s This City Is Killing Me highlights the role of policy and social context in mental illness michelle anderson.........................................12 as the city reopens, mental health clinics keep services at a distance

Clinics permanently adopt telehealth jim daley..........................................................14 “slaysian,”

an art show at home

An Asian American exhibition adapts to the pandemic era eileen li...........................................................16 people’s media

-

juneteenth snapshot

antwonette burton......................................19 the promises and pitfalls of adu’s

“Something about putting affordable units in the garden, forcing people underground, just feels not right.” david segeye....................................................20 the final piece of saint anthony’s puzzle

Competing interests fight for one empty La Villita lot josephine wang...............................................21 trivia

Cover Illustration by Grae Rosa

martha bayne..................................................25 JUNE 24, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

JUSTICE

Opinion: The Nonprofit Case to Defund the Police

Now is the time to fully fund social services in the name of public safety

BY JACKIE ROSA

This piece is part of a series that explores the various perspectives around defunding the police.

A

fter weeks of protest following the murder of George Floyd, we are, as a nation, at a turning point. It is no longer enough to fire, prosecute, or convict so-called “bad apple” police officers. We must defund the institution of policing as we know it. The calls to disinvest in policing and reinvest in Black lives mean precisely what they say: taking bloated police budgets used for punitive measures (often at the cost of our most vulnerable) and instead funding our neighborhoods. The nonprofit social service sector is uniquely positioned to advocate for the reallocation of funding in the name of public safety.

I have worked in the Chicago nonprofit sector for almost all of my professional career. For over a decade, I have provided direct service and I currently support social services through grant-making. I have witnessed program cuts, organizations barely able to keep their doors open, and the constant struggle to secure funding while trying to provide basic needs with limited staff. All the while, funding for policing budgets has grown.

ILLUSTRATION BY GRAE ROSA

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As I reflect on what it would mean in Chicago to disinvest in policing and reinvest in Black lives, I think of all the transformative work the nonprofit social sector has been able to achieve with limited resources. I think of all the families, mothers, fathers, and children whose lives have changed because of their local communitybased organization that provided for them.

I think of all the survivors of domestic abuse who escaped their abuser and were able to start over because of their local DV agency and shelter. I think of all the social workers that address community trauma and mental health with uninsured patients who would otherwise be unable to receive therapy. I think of all the young people who are mentored and provided with educational supports and training for living-wage jobs.

I think of all the street outreach workers who treat drug addicts with humanity and respect.

Chicago has nearly tripled per capita police spending since 1964, according to Injustice Watch.This year, Chicago budgeted $1.6 billion for its police department, not including the money set aside for police misconduct lawsuits and police pensions.

In 2013, fifty public schools and six mental health clinics were shuttered in the name of austerity. However, this phenomenon is not unique to Chicago. Since the 1990s, the federal government has prioritized "tough on crime” bills that increase police and prison spending while simultaneously cutting funding for welfare, SNAP benefits, and social service programming. Has this equation resulted in safer communities?

The answer is no. Instead, it has resulted in further disinvestment and over-policing in primarily Black neighborhoods. Under this funding equation, poverty, mental health, addiction, are criminalized.

Ask anyone who has ever worked in the nonprofit sector; we take our mission and vision statements very seriously.

These statements reflect the values of the organization and the community they seek to change as a result of their work. Hours are spent crafting the perfect mission, and even more hours are spent on crafting the ideal vision. The vision for communities almost always includes delivering a better quality of life for all residents. That includes all the aforementioned components of a thriving community, like affordable housing, educational support, mental health, and job training—basic needs that white resourcerich communities take for granted. Never does the quality of life include over-policing residents or the incarceration of minors.

Research shows that access to quality education, employment, housing, and healthcare are deterrents to violence and crime. Social service programs that focus on the underlying systemic issues are most successful in crime prevention, and community-based organizations (CBOs) are at the epicenter of providing social services that directly connect to lower crime rates and increased community wellness.

CBOs are trusted community pillars that provide vital resources, working in conjunction with government agencies when they fall short. The frontline staff supports residents through case management and wraparound services that include substance abuse treatment, rehabilitation, support for survivors of domestic violence, affordable housing, employment training, and mental healthcare.

Unfortunately, nonprofit organizations’ services are limited by a lack of funding and staffing support, while forty percent of Chicago’s general operating budget goes to the police. As a whole, the nonprofit sector is overworked and underpaid. That is nowhere more apparent than in CBOs, which employ some of the lowest-paid workers in the industry. The average salary for a case manager in 2019 was $30-40,000.

In comparison, the average starting salary

of a police officer is close to $50,000, not including overtime. Imagine redirecting police dollars to hiring more case managers.

Over the years, private funding and philanthropic efforts have attempted to cover the cost of social services as they moved beyond traditional charity to driving social change. This form of funding invests in long-term programmatic goals that, in theory, work to change systemic issues.

However, philanthropy often creates competing interests among CBOs, pitting organizations against each other for the same pot of money and fostering a neverending funding application cycle that drains staff time and takes a toll on actual impact.

It also allows for a problematic grantmaking structure that is driven by metrics and lacking in lived experience.

Defunding the police and reinvesting in social services means nonprofits can move away from heavily relying on the discretion of charitable giving. If the city were to free up a percentage of the overall budget that goes to CPD, it would have enough money to reopen mental health clinics and fund city and nonprofit social service agencies to provide needed comprehensive services. Shifting police dollars to nonprofit social service organizations would decrease crime rates, address underlying social and economic causes, and provide communitybased accountability and responsibility. I think about beautiful, thriving, and safe communities with fully funded social services, and that these communities are possible. I know that the time to defund the police is now. Chicago native Jackie Rosa fosters communityled initiatives and empowering young people through her work in nonprofits and philanthropy. She is the director of community engagement at United Way of Metro Chicago and expresses her views independently. This is her first piece for the Weekly.

JUSTICE

Opinion: Chicago’s overpoliced neighborhoods will remain “occupied” until the city defunds CPD Simon Balto’s history of police in Black Chicago shows why CPD can’t be reformed

BY BOBBY VANECKO

This piece is part of a series that explores the various perspectives around defunding the police.

T

he book Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power, published last year, details the history of the Chicago Police Department’s quasi-military occupation of the city’s Black communities from the race riots of 1919 through the present day.

Author Simon Balto, an assistant professor of African American history at the University of Iowa, demonstrates that “there is not a time in Chicago’s history where the city was home to large percentages of [B]lack people, and in which they had a smoothly functioning relationship with the CPD.” While most histories of mass incarceration start around the “War on Drugs” or “War on Crime” eras, Balto shows that those years’ massive investments towards expanding and militarizing America’s police forces had such devastating effects precisely because the police had already gained decades of experience working as the hired enemies of Black people, in the words of James Baldwin.

CPD was formally founded in 1853, at a time when local economic and political elites were eager to control the city’s growing population of immigrants who they believed to be unruly and immoral. As labor leaders and progressives organized for better working conditions and economic security throughout the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the police were a tool to suppress

these movements and keep people from questioning the socioeconomic and racial status quo—a function that the police continue to serve today, as we saw in the police violence during mass protests in response to the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and others. This is even acknowledged in the book by the police themselves—Balto quotes an interview with former CPD Superintendent Leroy Martin in which he said, “What police work does, all over the nation, is to try to protect the city’s economic interests… basically just trying to contain the problems that occur in a geographical area, trying to make sure that the parts of the city that work continue to work, and in those parts that don’t work trying to keep the level of violence down and under control.”

Further, in the face of obscene white racial terrorism leading up to and including the 1919 race riots, Balto describes how “members of the CPD repeatedly proved themselves to be defenders of whiteness and the color line, rather than protectors of all life and livelihood.” Even though twice as many Black people were killed and injured during the riots (which were started by white people and enabled by police inaction), twice as many Black people were arrested and indicted. Throughout the years that followed, including Prohibition and the Depression, the CPD was rampant with corruption and abuse, criminalizing entire Black neighborhoods and subjecting them to indiscriminate arrests and brutality.

Throughout the middle part of the century, Chicago’s Black population grew from about 8.2 percent to 32.7 percent. At the same time, from 1945 to 1970, the city’s police budget grew 900 percent and the CPD doubled the number of cops on the streets. Throughout this period, CPD really earns the title Balto gave the book: arrest quotas, “neighborhood saturation,” stop and frisk, and torture systematically terrorized— and through fines and fees, and collateral consequences (legal restrictions on accessing housing, public benefits, jobs, etc. for people with criminal records)—impoverished entire communities. Because policing in Chicago was fundamentally racist from the beginning, as Occupied Territory demonstrates, these huge investments in criminalization had devastating effects for Black and Brown Chicagoans. White arrest numbers dropped eighty-eight percent from the 1950s to the 2010s, while Black arrest rates skyrocketed—driving Black/white arrest disparities to rates of around sevento-one by 1998 in a city with roughly equal proportions of Black and white people.

The Cook County criminal legal system was not the only feature of racial capitalism that exploited the city’s growing Black population—the real estate industry also made billions through redlining, contract buying, and other public-private partnerships. Further, throughout the “urban crises” of the 1960s and the economic and political crises of the 1970s, Balto details how policymakers at all levels

hollowed out essential government services while shoveling money towards death making institutions like police and prisons.

He writes that, mirroring the federal government’s spending priorities, “the city threw increasing amounts of money at the police department while declining to invest in programs that would alleviate misery, reduce poverty, and enhance opportunity.”

The most powerful resistance in this period came from groups like the Black Panthers, whose radical politics and mutual aid programs helped thousands in their communities even as they had to dedicate significant organizational resources to defending themselves from racist repression from the CPD and FBI. The chapters detailing the work of the Panthers throughout the turmoil of the 1960s, including the police riot at the 1968 Democratic convention and the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in 1969, are Balto’s most prophetic. He details how “the Panthers didn’t have to tell community members to dislike or distrust the police, as if those sorts of sentiments were foreign to the West or South Sides… But what the Panthers did do was lift those grievances high into the public arena, infuse them with a more radical critique of capitalism and exploitation, and formulate specific strategies around them.” Two of the most important of those political strategies were campaigns calling for community control of the police, and for the city to redirect funds from the ballooning police budget JUNE 24, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

JUSTICE

towards community resources like schools, housing, healthcare, and jobs programs.

Unfortunately, the Panthers were not able to get these policies enacted, but today there are powerful movements in the city for these same demands.

One of the many reasons why Balto’s book is so crucial is the way that he demonstrates how Black Chicagoans have resisted CPD repression for as long as it has existed, from the NAACP and Chicago Freedom Movement to the Black Panthers to We Charge Genocide. While we have already experienced the familiar moralizing about “riots” in the wake of the latest uprisings, Balto shows that such direct action has always been political; “Whether [B]lack Communists in the 1930s or the Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s or Black Lives Matter activists in the 2010s, mainstream opinion-makers have consistently tried to discredit criticisms of the police and the larger socioeconomic system that they protect as hovering at the extreme intellectual and political margins.

But then as now, what those activists were doing was not so much telling people what to think about the police as they were channeling opinions that large sections of the community already held.” The fact is that these uprisings will continue for as long as the structural conditions exist that allow police to occupy communities and kill and brutalize with impunity, as Balto’s comprehensive history demonstrates.

The 2020 CPD budget was appropriated 1.6 billion, which is around forty percent of the city’s general operating budget—many times more than what the city spends on violence prevention programs, housing, healthcare, jobs programs, transportation, or any other of the other essential government services that benefit peoples’ lives. Further, $153 million of that $1.6 billion total was set aside just for police misconduct lawsuits.

Consequently, as police continue to oppress primarily Black and Brown Chicagoans and miss over seventy percent of the consent decree deadlines, many grassroots groups are calling for the defunding of the Chicago Police Department.

In the wake of the protests, the Chicago Torture Justice Center released a statement in which they called for reparations and the divestment of fifty percent of CPD’s budget, with the money reinvested in public health, mental health, education, and housing in Black communities. This demand, called invest-divest by the Movement for Black Lives, is being made across the country, 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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including grassroots groups like Black Visions Collective in Minneapolis who demanded the defunding of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) to facilitate investment in community-led safety initiatives—leading to a veto-proof majority of the city council pledging to disband the MPD. In Chicago, the City Council’s Democratic Socialist Caucus has asserted that “cutting funding for police could lead to a better and safer Chicago," but Mayor Lori Lightfoot has rejected defunding and instead touted incremental reforms, which fail to shift power and resources from policing and imprisonment to communities.

In a New York Times op-ed, writer Philip V. McHarris and organizer Thenjiwe McHarris point out that the Minneapolis Police Department is often held up as a model for “procedural justice” and liberal police reform—having implemented implicit bias training, body cameras, and community policing—and yet George Floyd was still murdered by an officer who was able to rack up a lengthy misconduct record with virtual impunity. They assert, “The focus on training, diversity and technology like body cameras shifts focus away from the root cause of police violence and instead gives the police more power and resources. The problem is that the entire criminal justice system gives police officers the power and opportunity to systematically harass and kill with impunity. The solution to ending police violence and cultivating a safer country lies in reducing the power of the police and their contact with the public.”

As uprisings against police violence have once again erupted in Chicago and throughout the nation, Balto’s book is an essential hundred-plus year history that demonstrates that there is no reforming CPD—the department must be defunded in the immediate term and made obsolete in the long term. As McHarris and McHarris put it, “We need to reimagine public safety in ways that shrink and eventually abolish police and prisons while prioritizing education, housing, economic security, mental health and alternatives to conflict and violence.” Considering the thoroughly and unceasingly racist and oppressive history of CPD that Occupied Territory lays out, and the continuing failures to “reform” the department, the only way forward is to heed the calls to defund the police and invest in community. ¬

Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power. $29.95. The University of North Carolina Press. 360 pages Bobby Vanecko is a contributor to the Weekly. He is a law student at Loyola University Chicago.

He last wrote in May about the Bring Chicago Home and Right to Recovery movements.

JUSTICE

Sitting Ducks

As Cook County Jail’s population rises again, advocates fear a spike in COVID-19 cases will follow

BY KIRAN MISRA

A

fter significant reductions in the Cook County Jail population, which reached a record low of 4,026 at the height of the pandemic, the number of people in jail is once again on the rise after the protests and arrests of the last few weeks. Currently, 4,524 people are awaiting trial or serving out sentences in the jail, which remains a hotspot for coronavirus transmission in the city.

Despite federal court orders to improve sanitation and testing there are still daily reports out of the jail that people currently inside are not being adequately tested for COVID-19 and do not have appropriate access to sanitation and protective equipment, according to Matt McLoughlin, director of programs for the Chicago Community Bond Fund. So far, seven people have died awaiting their trials and hundreds more have tested positive for COVID-19 and are facing life-long health impacts from the virus. “Leaving people in the jail, I would argue, is leaving people to die. As somebody incarcerated in the jail put it, they're basically playing duck, duck, goose with their lives,” said McLoughlin.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, along with county Chief Judge Timothy Evans, publicly committed to reviewing the cases of those currently in Cook County Jail and releasing those who did not pose a public safety threat.

However, data analysis from the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice shows that the State’s Attorney’s Office’s actions over the last few months have been at odds with the public commitments to release detainees. “We had been hearing that, despite what Kim Foxx has said publicly about her office cooperating with the decarceration effort, a lot of public defenders and private attorneys were seeing their motions [to release] opposed,” said Sarah Staudt, a senior policy analyst and staff attorney at the Appleseed Fund who authored a report

PHOTO BY CHARLES EDWARD MILLER

evaluating the State’s Attorney’s Office’s response to the pandemic. Staudt asked the Cook County Public Defender and State’s Attorney’s Office for court watching data from bond hearings held in March, April, and early May, and found that the State’s Attorney’s Office objected to release in the vast majority of cases.

Specifically, of the 2,366 motions for bond reduction argued between March 23 and April 22, the State’s Attorney’s Office argued against release in eighty percent of cases. Over the next few weeks, the State’s Attorney’s Office’s objection rate fell slightly,

to between seventy and eighty percent.

Though the bond court judge makes the final determination regarding bond and the release of detainees from custody, objections from the State’s Attorney hold significant weight. According to the Appleseed Fund analysis, while judges granted over ninety percent of motions when the State’s Attorney’s Office agreed to release, they granted only fifty-three percent of motions for release when prosecutors objected to it.

In an interview with the Weekly, Foxx argued that the methodology for analysis and sourcing for the data presented in the

Appleseed Fund report may overstate the extent of opposition to release from the State’s Attorney’s Office, stating, “The methodology was based on hand counts [of hearings] from the Public Defender.

We didn’t have anything to reconcile that [data] with … we weren't counting that in the same way that the Public Defender was counting.” However, the State’s Attorney’s Office has not yet conducted their own analysis of their motions in opposition to release, citing the cost and time required to get the necessary records from the Clerk of the Circuit Court’s office as limiting factors.

JUNE 24, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

JUSTICE

The State’s Attorney’s Office has been collecting other data on their work and said in a statement to the Weekly, “The State’s Attorney’s Office worked quickly to review more than 2,700 cases and recommended releases for hundreds of individuals. These efforts contributed to a [twenty-eight percent] decrease in the jail population at Cook County Jail… The Public Defender’s Office, along with other defense attorneys, continue to request hearings on violent crimes which do not fit the criteria imposed by the court’s order for emergency bond hearings.”

But not all of the objections from the State’s Attorney’s Office are solely in cases involving violent crimes. “We've heard about plenty of cases where people had charges that fit into the categories [of nonviolent offenses],” said McLoughlin. As a result, there are still people in Cook County Jail for dozens of minor charges including retail theft, cannabis possession with the intent to deliver, driving on a suspended license, and narcotics possession.

Additionally, even those charged with violent crimes are eligible for release.

“Sometimes you have a case that would be considered violent, but also the defendant is sixty years old, for example … a person who is particularly susceptible to COVID-19, which is why their defense attorney brought the case forward [for bond reduction],” explained Staudt.

In March, Foxx stated that her office would not be prosecuting low-level drug offenses during the pandemic. However, some who were charged prior to this change and were unable to pay bail remain incarcerated. The State’s Attorney’s Office also continues to prosecute people for charges that don’t involve physical danger to another person during the pandemic and those who are serving out sentences in the jail after being convicted of misdemeanors have not been categorically released.

“The jail works two ways, it's people coming in and people getting out,” said Foxx.

“There are a significant number of people who have not come into that jail because we've not prosecuted or charged low-level drug crimes. We also have not been charging people with violations of probation since the pandemic started. What we've been able to see in the last several months is that the world hasn't collapsed because we stopped prosecuting drug offenses and 1,000-plus people have been released from jail without incident. These decarceration efforts should have been there in the first place.”

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Throughout her first term as State’s Attorney and reelection campaign over the last year, Foxx stressed her commitment to ending the practice of monetary bail in Cook County, a practice that has no proven impact on public safety and results in disparate outcomes in the criminal justice system based on wealth alone. But according to court watchers, prosecutors are still objecting to bond reductions where it’s clear someone is unable to pay the higher amount.

“Prosecutors are arguing for bonds to remain [as they are] when people are coming to court saying, ‘I have $1,000, I do not have $7,000,’ … If the State's Attorney wants someone to remain in jail, there's a procedure to follow and evidence to be presented,” said Staudt, noting that keeping people incarcerated solely based on wealth is unconstitutional and against local court mandates.

Foxx said that her office is working to address these concerns, albeit slowly. “We have spoken to the Vera Institute [of Justice] to do a … review of how we can improve the bond process, both from our office and the public defender's office, and the system to see: how did we get here? What can we do better? What are best practices and lessons learned across the country?”

As a result of a targeted campaign to put pressure on key decision makers, a petition from the Cook County Public Defender’s Office for mass release from the jail, and a class-action federal lawsuit, the jail population dropped by around 1,500 over the course of the pandemic, but numbers have been increasing again in recent days after mass arrests at protests across the city.

According to data from the State’s Attorney’s Office, of the total 934 felony arrests that were made between May 29 and June 8, the State’s Attorney’s Office approved 732 for prosecution and rejected ninety-six, with a eighty-eight percent approval rate.

Among 226 charges for burglary that the State’s Attorney’s Office reviewed, 200 were approved and eight were rejected. These approvals and rejections are informed by the State’s Attorney’s perception of their ability to meet their burden of proof and confidence in the ability to identify those charged as actually being connected to an incident.

“We are not prosecuting people for exercising their first amendment right.

We’ve seen a number of people who were arrested on gun violations, we saw a number of people who were referred for charges of burglary, the colloquial ‘looting.’ We've seen some instances of aggravated battery to

“Leaving people in the jail, I would argue, is leaving people to die. As somebody incarcerated in the jail put it, they're basically playing duck, duck, goose with their lives.” police officers. Last year at this time, we had maybe seven burglaries. This year we have forty.… We also had eighteen homicides in one day, which is unprecedented violent crime in the city of Chicago,” said Foxx.

According to the Cook County Sheriff ’s Office, on April 10, there were 307 detainees who had tested positive for the virus. As of Sunday, June 14, twentythree detainees are currently positive. But the recent increase in jail population raises concerns for advocates who say a second wave of infection could follow the recent relaxation in social distancing policies, and note that the increasing jail population makes practicing social distancing even more difficult.

Matthew Walberg, a spokesperson for the Sheriff ’s Office, told the Weekly in a statement, “Testing at the jail has always far exceeded what has been available to the general public during this pandemic. Every detainee is tested when they enter custody— whether they show symptoms or not. Those who test positive or show signs of an illness are immediately isolated and receive medical supervision from our partners at Cermak Health Services. Detainees around that person are also quarantined and tested.”

However, reports from inside the jail differ. “There are countless stories of people who had fevers and were never tested or lost their sense of taste and smell and were never tested, people that came in direct contact with people who had tested positive, even one declaration from somebody who was in contact one of the, one of the people who died [and was never tested],” said McLoughlin, who runs the Bond Fund’s hotline answering calls from people inside the jail. “We've heard from numerous people who have gone weeks without having their clothes or sheets cleaned. Their two bars of soap are running out within a day or two. The federal court has ordered that hand sanitizer be available to people in the jail, but whether or not they actually get access to it is really at the whim of the correctional officers. …

These people are sharing the same phones, they're literally sitting elbow to elbow.”

Walberg said, “There is and has always been copious amounts of soap, hand sanitizer, cleaning products and PPE available to detainees and staff… In many cases, we have innovated beyond recommended measures, including the opening of an off-site isolation and recovery facility, the massive effort to convert every available cell to singleoccupancy, and safely re-opening previously shuttered divisions to provide extra space for social distancing.”

However, the relocation to parts of the jail that had previously been shut down, some of them for several years, brought additional concerns for advocates. These settings brought additional sanitation concerns, as they weren’t cleaned before people were relocated there. “There were rat feces in the rooms where people were brought in, the pipes in the cells didn't work because they hadn't been used in four years so when they turned on the water, it was black,” said McLoughlin. Other parts of the jail have reported mold and rodent problems before the pandemic, which coupled with the respiratory issues caused by COVID–19, could put those in the jail at even greater risk of serious illness or death. (Walberg did not respond to these claims.)

Currently, all those incarcerated in Cook County Jail, including those incarcerated over the last week, remain at a high risk for contracting COVID–19, with just one infected person needed for a large-scale breakout in what is already an established coronavirus hotspot. And with a new influx of people traveling in and out of the jail every day, every action taken in Cook County’s courts and jail impacts not just those incarcerated, but all of Chicago. Kiran Misra is a writer for the Weekly who primarily covers criminal justice and policing in Chicago. She last wrote about the city administration citing the Chicago Freedom School for feeding protesters.

JUSTICE

A Mother’s Investigation Q&A with Shapearl Wells, mother of the murdered Courtney Copeland and co-host of Somebody, a podcast exploring racial disparities and distrust of the Chicago Police Department, and Invisible Institute journalist Alison Flowers

BY AMY QIN

Before George Floyd begged Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for his life under a lethal chokehold, on the night of March 4, 2016, twenty-two-year old Courtney Copeland had begged Chicago police officers for help after he was shot in his car near the 25th District police station on Chicago’s northwest side.

Copeland could likely have survived the injury had the officers on duty that night treated him as a victim of a shooting, rather than a suspect. But the officers handcuffed Copeland and delayed calling an ambulance.

And when the ambulance did arrive, it took him to a trauma center fifteen minutes farther than the nearest one. It was this fifteen-minute disparity that determined Copeland’s fate: his heart stopped just four minutes before they arrived at the hospital.

Somebody is a podcast by and about Copeland’s mother, Shapearl Wells, and her search for answers when the Chicago Police Department didn’t provide them. It took Wells four years, and a partnership with journalists at the Invisible Institute, to uncover information that should have been revealed days after the murder. And still to this day, no one has been charged in Copeland’s murder.

Wells is the podcast’s primary narrator.

There is something special about that. You can feel her tenacity and strength. But you also get a sense of what it is like to be a mother who has lost her son, and who also now faces a system that places little value on his life. In this way, Somebody offers a unique perspective on police accountability and the tenuous, tense relationship police have with the communities they’re supposed to protect.

Somebody is a seven-part podcast (plus a bonus episode, a June conversation between Wells and Invisible Institute director Jamie Kalven) produced by the Invisible Institute,

The Intercept, and Topic Studios, in partnership with iHeartMedia and Tenderfoot TV. It is available to stream on all podcast platforms.

The Weekly interviewed Wells and Invisible Institute producer Alison Flowers about the production of the podcast, the investigation, and what it means for police accountability and citizen trust going forward. This interview has been edited for clarity.

How did the idea for Somebody come about, and why did you choose to make it a podcast?

Alison Flowers: During Shapearl’s investigation, she had made these voice diaries that were very powerful and emotional. She also had the recordings of her conversation with police, so we thought a podcast would be the best way to tell this multi-part story. It also had to do with Shapearl herself, and the way she really commands the story. In the tradition of investigative journalism podcasts, typically it’s the reporter who would host, but we decided to disrupt the genre and asked Shapearl if she would voice the podcast; we felt [this] made the story more inclusive. I think journalists need to be okay with taking a back seat, and sharing more power with their sources, and work[ing] with them to tell their own stories. I think th[at this is] part of why it’s really resonating with listeners.

Shapearl, have you ever hosted a podcast before or done a similar project?

Shapearl Wells: Absolutely not. This was the first time that I had done something this extraordinary.

AF: From a craft perspective, we did multiple in-depth interviews with Shapearl near the beginning of our relationship with her. This served as a template for the series.

Every script went through multiple rounds of feedback from Shapearl, even when we were in the studio to report the narration, we made even more tweaks based on how she would prefer to say it or how it came out naturally in the moment. Shapearl was involved every step of the way, and definitely took the lead in the process.

What was it like revisiting all the moments of your investigation as the host of this podcast?

SW: It took me back to remembering what happened with my son, it took me through all those moments. It was difficult, but it was a necessary process in order to get the story told. I felt like it was a labor of love. Even though there was so much pain involved in it, I thought that it was essential that someone hear what happened to Courtney.

Initially your investigation led you to think that the police were responsible for shooting Courtney. How did you work through the production of the podcast as what you were learning about what happened to Courtney changed?

AF: Even while we were putting the series together, we were still investigating. We had entire episodes turned upside down because of developments in the case.

SW: In episode three, when we experienced the shift away from thinking the police did it, that was when I went through the whole process of ‘if the police did it versus if the

police didn’t do it’. Everyone was on the same page in that we wanted to come to a conclusion, but we wanted the evidence to lead us to whatever it was. Everybody makes mistakes, and we recognized the mistake and we didn’t continue it. We didn’t continue that it was CPD [who did it], instead we corrected it and continued with our investigation. When Jamie left me that day, which I say in the podcast, [he said] we now need to ‘investigate our own investigation,’ which means that we want to be one-hundred percent correct on everything before we took this investigation out, because integrity is the most important part of the podcast.

AF: When we walked back our thinking about the police’s involvement in Courtney’s murder, what we realized is we end up with a story about everyday systemic racism in Chicago. It looked at the encounters that contribute to such discord and distrust between the public, especially communities of color, and Chicago police. Looking at what we thought might have been one of the rare, yet terrible, incidents of the police killing a young Black man actually allowed us to explore a much more common occurrence: negative and racist encounters that citizens have with the police. That was an important shift, and it also allowed us to look at other aspects of police accountability: it’s not just about police killing Black people, it’s about deprioritizing their cases [and] having such a low murder solve rate for Black citizens in Chicago and conducting very superficial investigations. All of that was part of this picture of police accountability, that we tried to create from multiple angles.

One of the most powerful parts of the podcast for me were the recordings of the conversations Shapearl had with the investigating officers. Shapearl, how did you feel when you were in those rooms?

SW: My encounters with the CPD were very hostile. They were very disrespectful and dismissive to me. I felt that I was the only one who cared about solving my son’s muder. I still feel that way. I still feel they didn’t do a good enough job to solve his murder. Essentially what the podcast breaks down is that the information I gave them four days after my son was murdered, was really the information they needed to solve the murder. To this day, they still haven’t followed up with that information.

My encounters with police just show me the JUNE 24, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

JUSTICE

lack of respect they have for Black mothers, and the lack of concern they have for Black lives. Everything was more about them and how I was making them feel. They felt I was questioning their authority, and that I didn’t have the right as a mom to question their right to process this case. I was standing my ground, even though I felt intimidated at times. I still stand my ground, because it is important to me to convey to them that I am not going to stop. I want you to find out who killed my son, so everything I’m doing is to push you to do the job you’re supposed to do. How I feel now is that this podcast, and the constant pressure [I’m putting on them], is the only way Courtney’s murder is going to get solved. If you let CPD decide

which cases they want to solve, it’s more than likely that it will not be cases involving Black people.

AF: I’ll add that in the investigation, we were looking at how the police treated Courtney but also at how they were treating Shapearl. The way they talked to a grieving mother just says it all about how they regard Black people as a whole.

When did you realize you needed to take the investigation into your own hands?

SW: From my first encounter at the hospital, when they couldn’t give me any information.

They didn’t know where or what happened

to my son. When I talked to them the next day, they still didn’t have any information.

I thought “Okay, let me just give my son the justice he deserves, and get down to the business of solving this murder.” It was almost immediate.

We went into the neighborhood to try to gather as much information as possible because I felt that time was of the essence.

If we were to solve this murder, we had to get information fast, while everything was still fresh in people’s heads. They were not giving me enough information about what happened to my son, and to me, they were just okay with taking their sweet time. When I went to that first meeting with them, I was

expecting answers on what they had seen on video and what they hadn’t seen. I expected a more thorough investigation, and they hadn’t even begun it. What bothered me the most [was] that they took the word of the officers at face [value], and didn’t further investigate to make sure they had pulled the right information from the witnesses. It just seemed like to me that they were not concerned with solving the murder.

As of now, has the the murder been solved?

Do you know who shot Courtney?

SW: No, it’s still up in the air. We presented the detectives with a lot of evidence and potential suspects that they have yet to follow

ILLUSTRATION BY SAVANNA STEFFENS

“I can count on one hand how many times I talked to detectives, and they have yet to give me any pertinent information about my son.”

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JUSTICE

AF: We hit a point in the case where we felt compelled to go back to the same detectives for a follow up conversation. There had been another incident in the neighborhood, and we felt it was best to make them aware of what we had heard at that point. So we met with the detectives again, and gave them a roadmap to the case as best we could with what we had uncovered together. But a year after the meeting I happened to run into one of the detectives, and he called Shapearl after, but it was clear that they really hadn’t followed up on any of the leads or additional witnesses we had given them. It appeared that they had not been solving it: [they] put it in the cold case unit, and they included the wrong corner Courtney was shot on and identified the wrong neighborhood, [saying] that he was Portage Park [when] he was actually shot in Belmont Cragin. Again, it just shows the complete lack of care and detail they paid to this case, in getting it right, and in trying to get it across the finish line.

What was it like working together? Did either of you realize it was going to take so long?

SW: I didn’t realize it was going to take so long, but I was okay with that, because my ultimate goal was to get answers for Courtney so however long it took, it didn’t really matter. I just wanted to get the information to bring closure to my situation, and to try to bring awareness to the injustices that he endured.

I couldn’t think of a better partnership. I felt that this [podcast] was my baby, and me encompassing all that happened, and I felt that they carried that same love for Courtney that I carried for him. This story became their story as well, so I couldn’t ask for a better partnership.

AF: Shapearl and I were in constant contact—sometimes even in the middle of the night we would send each other text messages, [going over] details that we kept coming back to. It was intimate, it was

involved, [it was] intense. We advanced the case together, taking what Shapearl did on her own and using that as a launching pad for more information.

There was [also] the process of telling the story together. It’s hard to ask someone to talk about the most painful event of their life multiple times. When it came to narrating it, that was difficult and we wanted to spare Shapearl from any more trauma. But it was [still] a very painful process for everybody.

I can think of one example, where she’s narrating the scene beside Courtney’s hospital bed. When you’re putting together the podcast episode, typically you do a rough take and then you get some additional sound design, and then later you come back for the final, with any revisions. But for that scene, we only asked her to read it once, so the take that you hear, in episode one, is the only take, and it’s breathtakingly beautiful and emotional. I felt good about the decision to not ask her to do it again, and I also think it wasn’t a question of improving it, it was as raw and as powerful as it could ever be.

From a production standpoint, the texture of it doesn’t match the rest of the narration, but we felt completely okay with that.

There is a bonus eighth episode in which you have a conversation with Jamie Kalven about our current moment of civil resistance. Shapearl, you describe the movement for Black lives and police accountability as an “existing undercurrent that has risen up, and is now overflowing”.

How do you reflect on this moment, and how is Courtney’s story relevant?

SW: Stories of police and state violence have always been rampant. It’s just now, because of social media and technology, we’re seeing more of it. What you’re seeing now is Black people actually rebelling against the system.

They’re tired of being tired and silent, and they’re beginning to raise their voices. And we’re not doing it alone, which is what we talk about in the episode. We’re seeing a collaboration with Black and brown people, and white people who are understanding the history of systemic racism in America. We have always had issues with police and police brutality. This is nothing new. But what we’re seeing is the undercurrent is rising up, people are saying enough is enough. They’re tired of it, and something has to change.

That’s why we’re forcing the issue right now.

For me, with George Floyd, just like how he begged for his life, my son also begged for

his. He was begging the police to help him, to assist him in his time of need. But [the police] allowed my son to die. Even though they didn't pull a trigger, the outcome was still the same: they still disregarded his life and he died in their hands, and it was unnecessary. I felt that my son could have been at the hospital within five to seven minutes if they had recognized the urgency and they cared about Black lives. You see people out here trying to tell America, “hey look what’s happening!” It’s not that all lives don’t matter, or blue lives don’t matter, but we as Black people are under attack, at an enormous and alarming rate. Youhear George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, those highlighted names, but there are so many more invisible people who have died. There are so many people like Courtney who never get the attention to their story, and they suffered the same consequences.

Do you feel hopeful for change? How do you think we as a society will move forward?

SW: The first thing is we all have to recognize we have a problem. What I’d like to see is tangible evidence of change. There’s a lot of people like legislators who say, ‘yes we agree that Black lives matter.’ Well, what are you going to do to make a change? Until we have tangible legislation that makes significant changes [to] hold them accountable like [police] malpractice insurance, a nationwide police database, and [police] licenses just like doctors and lawyers have. Specifically with Courtney, implementing scoop and run, that is something that is essential to save more Black lives. The fact that my son lay bleeding on the ground for thirteen minutes before he was even put in an ambulance, and they took him to a hospital fifteen more minutes away, that cost my son his life.

AF: These issues used to be such a niche for journalists, but now many are covering these as part of a general assignment reporting beat. The dialogue has changed. To see NASCAR saying “BLM” is not something any of us imagined happening. Not that saying the phrase is everything, there’s a lot of policy changes that need to happen everywhere, but naming it is so important.

I would have thought we were very far off from having an op-ed in the NYT by Mariame Kaba about abolishing the police.

There’s a lot of disagreement and discourse about what that should look like, but now politicians are starting to get uncomfortable

and looking at how their constituencies are feeling about this. It does give me some hope.

Why should someone listen to Somebody right now?

SW: It’s important for us to understand the police mentality that is actually hidden. It’s easy for us to see the officer with his knee on George Floyd’s neck. But what we also need to see is how everyday encounters with Black people and police occur. That’s one perspective from Somebody. Another perspective, as Alison said, is how they interact with families, how they’re solving these cases, how they prioritize these cases.

All of these are forms of disparities of how Black and brown people are treated in all aspects of law enforcement. I think it's important for us to broaden our vision about what’s really happening to Black and brown people in America. The Courtney Copeland Memorial Foundation was created in Copeland’s honor to invest in programs to help youth in inner city communities.

You can learn more or donate on their website at thecourtneycopelandmemorialfoundation.com.

Amy Qin is a writer from Chicago. She last wrote for the Weekly in 2019 about the effort to save St. Adalbert Church from being closed.

SPOILER ALERT! SSW GAME KEYS South Side Statues & Monuments Trivia Answers!

1. George Washington 2. Statue of the Republic 3. Monument to the Great Nortern Migration 4. Nuclear Energy 5. Benito Juárez 6. Abraham Lincoln 7. Marquette Monument 8. The Confederate Mound 9. The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Living Memorial 01. Paul Laurence Dunbar

up on; they do not care. I can count on one hand how many times I talked to detectives, and they have yet to give me any pertinent information about my son. I always brought them information, some of which they still deny, like the fact that my son was in handcuffs. So I have no confidence in CPD solving this murder.

JUNE 24, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

LIT

Community Policy, Community Health

Jonathan Foiles’s This City Is Killing Me highlights the role of policy and social context in mental illness through Chicago case studies

BY MICHELLE ANDERSON

I

first started writing this review of This City Is Killing Me: Community Trauma and Toxic Stress in Urban America prior to the current global pandemic. While nothing about the book changed, the starkness of its perspective—looking at issues of housing segregation, poverty, racism, and gendered violence as part of the larger landscape contributing to individuals’ experience with mental illness—seems particularly critical.

COVID-19 operates as the deadliest killer of vulnerable persons like those discussed in This City Is Killing Me because of that same larger landscape, and the mental health effects of living under its shadow are likely to do the same.

The book is a series of five case studies or narratives about therapeutic work done in collaboration between its author Jonathan Foiles, then a clinical social worker at Mt. Sinai Hospital in North Lawndale, and his clients. The narratives are presented as lengthier vignettes that are specific about policy and clinical details but accessible to lay people. Each person’s story simultaneously speaks to that person’s life struggles (the book’s subtitle is, after all, “community trauma and toxic stress in urban America”) and the social-historical context that makes the story seem almost inevitable. In an interview with the Weekly, Foiles said, “My writing bums people out.

We should be bummed out.” Instead of succumbing to the pain of trauma and stress, Foiles encourages us to “confront the impact policy decisions have upon the city’s poorest residents.”

Through Jacqueline, a patient diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, readers explore the intersection of mental illness and urbanization in the context of gentrification,

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safe spaces, and the closing of Chicago and Cook County’s public mental health clinics.

In the mental health field, a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder expresses someone’s experience of extreme instability in all relationships even with themselves.

The stigma of this diagnosis places a person at risk of being dismissed and judged harshly by peers and professionals. In the book, you are drawn (briefly) into Jacqueline’s family experience, her own struggles with gender identity, her eventual “pricing out” of the Boystown neighborhood where she once found some refuge, and her difficulty with a fixed income that doesn’t allow even the medical system in her life to be stable. The most consistent service Jacqueline received was publicly funded healthcare near her home. But when six of the city’s then-twelve public mental health clinics were closed in 2012, accessibility and continuity of care became simultaneously more challenging almost overnight. I would like to think that if someone reads this type of story, they can make a leap to appreciate that a context that feels unstable can work as both a catalyst and a continued reinforcement of an individual's pattern of instability.

Frida reminds us of the burden we place on parenting and the limited resources our child welfare system has to actually assist people in being the best caregiver they can. When we are introduced to Frida, she’s involved in services required by the state Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) to be reunited with her children (after one walked outside with no coat in a snowstorm), and is a few months past suicidal behavior that occurred while she was dealing with grief after her father’s death and her separation from her

LIT

“What This City Is Killing Me does is bring the issues of society and institutions into sharper focus by making plain the inextricable link between policy decisions and the mental health and well-being of people who live and die by these choices.”

children. Frida’s story includes a look at her ability to parent, and also who she is and how she reached her current struggles: her relationship with her father, who looked the other way when she was abused as a child and who may have suffered from mental illness; her relationship with heroin (she relapses into use); and her relationship with her children. DCFS, Foiles points out, was not as interested in dealing with Frida as a whole person—or even in giving her tools to succeed—as he was as a therapist. As her overloaded caseworkers kept leaving the agency, the state budget impasse at the time slowed down her access to required services, and Frida continued to face additional struggles in the rest of her life, her resolve was worn down. She eventually signed over her parental rights to a relative.

Frida’s story speaks to me as a parent; I can see myself in her. No parent is perfect, and yet my mistakes as a parent 1) may not show up until much further down the developmental path and 2) are not currently considered “errors” for which the penalty is involvement in the child welfare system. In my mind, it is clear that this is all that separates me—and many other Black parents—from the same fate. And if I represent a relatively healthy parent raising relatively healthy children, how much more challenging is it to not make a “mistake” if you carry the burdens of personal trauma and limited financial resources, and are expected to work within a system of interventions that, according to Foiles, “do little to help families learn how to better parent and have limited impact on the recidivism rate,” and instead attempts to socially control the movements of poor and predominantly Black and brown families?

The three men in the book experience delusional beliefs and homelessness, inflated sense of self and the salvation and damnation of CPS schools and trauma, and grief and loss through violence. I see them in other people I’ve known and seen, although not as much in my own identity. I am left wondering about their impact on others as men, who despite their woes carry a certain amount of power in relationships not experienced

by Jacqueline or Frida. Robert, a former Cabrini-Green resident who is homeless when we meet him, demonstrates how it might be safer and more rational to live in a world of your own making. Luis protects himself with mood changes and beliefs in his masculinity from facing the belief that his family and schools failed him. Anthony reminds us of the crushing grief and loss of a child in a society that labels children such as his as anything but childlike, and gives us the gritty reminder of the work still needed in criminal justice reform.

The book is not for light reading if you heed its call for engagement in policy issues around providing mental health clinics and insurance and addressing community violence, two things that come up in Foiles’s work with patients. Foiles explained to me that one of the first things he wrote for public engagement was a piece on the Affordable Care Act for Slate, and then he continued to write about policy and mental health until reaching this book. He discussed how therapists (and also frontline social service workers, as well as medical professionals) are seeing the “human impact” of policy when they see their clients. While Foiles acknowledges policymakers are not often “listening” to these stories, he believes more clinicians should “speak up.”

The problem with diagnosing mental illness is that, despite clinician intentions to the contrary, it is often treated as a biological and/or moral failure of the individual. We are in fact an un-empathic nation, built on a belief system of rugged individualism and exceptionalism. One way society displays this lack of empathy is encoded in policy decisions related to the social safety net— think aid and assistance for those in poverty or otherwise in need, services for older adults, and services for immigrants as prime examples. The belief in rugged individualism allows people to uncouple individual issues, here mental illness, from social context.

Belief in exceptionalism allows us to retain the concept of rising “above” problematic circumstances to achieve our dreams and goals.Therefore not only does mental illness become a failure of the individual, society then treats anything that is “different” or against normality as the natural outcome (and therefore undeserving of investment in remedies) for nonconformity to scripted, acceptable social roles. What This City Is Killing Me does is bring the issues of society and institutions into sharper focus by making plain the inextricable link between policy decisions and the mental health and well-being of people who live and die by these choices. Jonathan Foiles, This City Is Killing Me: Community Trauma and Toxic Stress in Urban America. $16.95. Belt Publishing.

130 pages

Congrats, Sam! From Florida man to Chicago organizer to Berkeley lawyer, we’ve been proud of you every step of the way!

Much love,

MM, Dad, TT & Billy

Michelle Anderson is an education editor at the Weekly. This is her first piece for the Weekly.

JUNE 24, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

HEALTH

As the City Reopens, Mental Health Clinics Keep Services at a Distance A “significant portion” of services could stay remote as clinics permanently adopt telehealth

BY JIM DALEY

I

n March, when the coronavirus pandemic shut down schools and businesses across Chicago, the city’s public mental health clinics also reduced walk-in services wherever possible and largely switched to providing therapy remotely via telephone or video conference. At a press conference on June 22 announcing how Chicago may ILLUSTRATION BY TURTEL ONLI

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move to phase four of reopening from the coronavirus shutdown, Dr. Allison Arwady, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH), said that clinics will start to move back into seeing patients in person after the city finishes an ongoing buildings assessment and implements upgrades to protect patrons and staff.

On May 21, CDPH announced a suite of mental health initiatives, including partnerships with four community mental health organizations and $1.2 million in new funding to expand access for persons with serious mental illnesses. The expansion of services also includes a new partnership with Doxy.me to provide behavioral health services—including psychotherapy, psychiatry, case management, and group sessions—to patients via online video conferencing. The partnership will cost the city about $35,000 per year, according to an invoice reviewed by the Weekly. In an interview with the Weekly, Matt Richards, the deputy commissioner of behavioral health, said the cost covers one hundred annual user licenses, which will include all the CDPH mental health clinicians.

Arwady said staff and patients have responded positively to tele-services, adding that she expects “a significant portion” of services will continue to be provided remotely even as the department begins bringing back in-person services. Richards said the department hopes to have its Doxy partnership fully rolled out by the end of the summer.

Telehealth removes some barriers to accessing mental health services, but it’s not without its drawbacks: clinicians say remote sessions lack many of the subtleties and nuance in-person therapy affords. When the city’s clinics—in Englewood, Bronzeville, Gage Park, North Lawndale, Roseland, and North Park—initially shut down, behavioral therapists scrambled to continue treating their patients remotely. Clinicians told the Weekly the transition was challenging. Jay Roth, a clinical social worker at the city’s North River Mental Health Center (MHC) in North Park, said CDPH did not provide

very much technical support at first, and therapists adapted as best they could, mostly providing therapy by phone and, in some cases, improvising video-conference sessions with Zoom.

“When you’re doing face-to-face therapy, you have a certain rapport and way of interacting that is really essential to the therapeutic process,” Roth said. He added that he has been cautious about using video conferencing with clients due to privacy and safety concerns. Roth also worried about the potential for a client to suddenly become distressed during a video call and drop the connection, leaving him unable to intervene.

Angela Sims, a clinical therapist at the Greater Lawn MHC in Gage Park, said that when the clinics stopped offering in-person therapy, she switched to treating clients over the phone. The medium put her clinical skills to the test. “You’re having to infer a lot more by just one mode of communication,” she said. “And there are a lot of people who just don’t emote well over the phone.” Getting a sense of whether a client is really doing as well as they say they are can be tricky.

During an in-person therapy session, Sims is able to use multiple senses—visual, smell, and hearing—to assess a client’s condition.

Over the phone, it’s harder to make sure she’s not missing anything beyond what the client is telling her.

“And that’s when they answer the phone,” she said. Some clients may not even pick up because they are preoccupied with kids or family. “There are some other folks who tend to just reach out only when they’re in crisis mode,” she said. “They’re not going to answer the phone just because you called.”

An intake—during which a clinician first talks to a new client to figure out their treatment needs—was one of the hardest

things to do over the telephone. When the shutdown began, clinics started informing new clients that they were doing intake assessments by phone. “We proceed to the best of our ability in doing that,” Roth said.

Clinicians try to quickly assess a client’s medication needs, and consult with a psychiatrist within a week of the intake. But a lot of the intake work involved explaining how the COVID-19 shutdown impacted service delivery and obtaining informed consent. All of that made the intake process slower.

Sims said that during these intake conversations, she finds herself “working very hard to emote” and show concern, as “doing an intake cold with someone you’re not meeting and won’t even see at all for a while” is extremely difficult. Sims said she would prefer to do an intake in person, even if it meant wearing personal protective equipment and sitting more than six feet apart.

One of the biggest challenges to providing therapy during the shutdown is helping clients navigate the loneliness associated with staying home alone. “We normally spend a lot of time discussing connectedness and avoiding isolation as effective ways to cope with mental health problems,” Roth said. “And here we are telling people to isolate for their own good.”

The quarantine has been particularly difficult for those clients that are more anxiety-prone, especially for those who may be in financially precarious situations, Sims said. “Those two groups sometimes overlap,” she said.

The clinicians have also had to maintain their own health and morale during the crisis. Sims said that one challenge the shift to telehealth brought is the “tedium” that comes from sitting by the phone all day.

Roth has continued working from the North River clinic, but aside from the receptionist, he is usually the only person in the office.

“That’s one of the weirdest parts,” he said.

And where in-person therapy sessions have a rhythm provided by greeting a patient and getting settled, none of that is available in remote therapy. “With Zoom…you click goodbye, and there they go, and you click right into the next meeting,” Roth said. “It gets really difficult to adjust to that, and create real separation mentally for myself between meetings.”

Any shift to telehealth can present a number of privacy and security concerns.

In April, a Mozilla Foundation report flagged security issues with Doxy. The

report, which assessed the security of fifteen video-conferencing apps, awarded Doxy just two and a half out of five stars—the lowest rating it gave. The report cited the platform’s weak password requirements, noting that even insecure passwords such as “123” were acceptable. In an email to the Weekly, Liz Savery, a spokesperson for Doxy, said that since the Mozilla report was released, the company has upgraded its password requirements. “A recent Doxy.me update forces (rather than suggests) a strong password,” she said.

CDPH takes security “with the highest degree of seriousness,” Richards said. “We will have an organizational policy about password complexity. Part of the process that we go through whenever we use software is developing a security plan related to that software.”

In a city where only six clinics remain of the original nineteen that existed in the 1990s, a patient’s therapist could be an hours-long CTA ride away. The partnership with Doxy is meant to address that barrier to access, but ensuring every patient can use the platform isn’t straightforward. Webbased telemedicine relies on dependable internet connections, which public mental health clinic patients may not have. Among those who do, it’s not certain that everyone will want to use the platform. “Probably a third of my clients are easily able to shift to” video-conferencing, Roth said.

Savery said a successful appointment over the platform requires a computer with camera, microphone, speakers, “the latest operating systems,” and an internet connection with at least 2 Mbps upload and download speeds.

Richards said CDPH is currently identifying how many patients might have difficulty using digital interfaces, as well as those who may not have the tools to do so.

“The first step for us is wrapping our arms around how many patients we anticipate would want to receive services this way, but for whom there is a current barrier so we can develop a plan to address it,” he said.

For now, the city clinics are continuing to provide services by phone for most patients. Richards said the department does not yet have a timeline for reopening clinics because most are still waiting for the city to assess them and make recommendations for infection-control upgrades. ¬

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Jim Daley is the Weekly’s politics editor. He last wrote about harassment of Chicago Freedom School during the May 30 protests.

JUNE 24, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

ARTS

“SLAYSIAN,” an Art Show at Home An Asian American exhibition adapts to the pandemic era

BY EILEEN LI

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"WHERE ARE YOU FROM", KAITLYN HWANG

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¬ JUNE 24, 2020

n her years on the Chicago art scene, curator Jenny Lam had never seen a large-scale exhibit that focused on local Asian American art. “So I figured I should be the one to do it,” she said.

After putting out an open call to Chicago and the surrounding Midwest, Lam chose thirty-nine Asian American artists to participate in the exhibit “SLAYSIAN.” The show was scheduled to run at the CoProsperity Sphere in Bridgeport, beginning Saturday, March 20.

But on March 15, as Lam was in the gallery assigning spots to the artworks, she heard Governor J.B. Pritzker on the radio pleading for Illinoisans to stay home. It was St. Patrick’s Day weekend, there were 3,000 known coronavirus cases in the U.S., and hosting a large gathering for an art show opening felt irresponsible.

Lam and her staff made the call to postpone the in-person show indefinitely and to move the exhibition online. The digital version of “SLAYSIAN,” like the in-person show, aims to shine a light on the presence of Asian American art in and around Chicago. Spanning neighborhoods, ethnicities, and mediums, “SLAYSIAN” showcases a subset of artists that have always been part of the city’s art scene, but rarely acknowledged as a collective.

The online exhibition presents each artist’s works alongside an introduction written by the artist. These texts often reflect how Asian Americans code each other and themselves in degrees of foreignness: when and at what age you immigrated, whether you speak your “native” language, your artistic and media influences, and your diasporic or biracial identities.

Some artists, such as Eddie Yeung and Nini Kao, specifically name the Asian influences they riff upon, like the art of Hayao Miyazaki and the foods eaten at

Chinese New Year. Others, such as Priscilla Huang, paint city scenes recognizable to many Chicagoans, like a Wednesday afternoon lounging in a city park.

On Bumjin Kim’s page, two of his computer-aided drawings highlight the spectrum of foreignness and localness that is implicitly read into Asian American work. In the drawing “Morning,” he depicts a bowl of rice with each grain articulated, complete with a pair of slanted chopsticks.

In “Evening,” a drawing of the same series, he portrays happy-hour ease by sliding an Intelligentsia coffee cup holder over a can of Goose Island 312 beer. Juxtaposed side by side, he manifests distinctly Chicagoan and perpetually Asian tastes over the course of a single day.

Taiwanese American artist Kaitlyn Hwang also grapples with the idea of foreignness in her painting “Where Are You From.” The oil-on-canvas painting is a self-portrait of Hwang in a traditional Chinese <i>qipao</i> with her daughter in a Superman costume. Hwang uses the figures in the portrait to contrast her immigrant upbringing with that of her half-Asian and more Americanized daughter: “I’m thinking, what kinds of traditions can I still teach her that she’ll remember so she can keep true to herself ? I just wanted to think about the future for her, and my past, and how we can come together, how we can both exist.”

Two of Hwang’s watercolors portray her hope that political engagement can build a better world for her daughters. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Hwang became involved with the Women’s March and local activist groups in her Oak Park community, and her paintings depict young families marching on Washington. “I actually took my girls canvassing a couple of times to get people aware of how important their vote is,” Hwang said. “I’m not sure

ARTS

if they will remember because they were only five and seven at the time, but that’s something I will remember.”

Eric Mah’s work with locally reclaimed wood highlights the deep roots of Asian American artists. Born and raised in Chicago, Mah first began woodworking in a class at Lane Tech High School and has continued the hobby over the years, mostly giving away pieces to friends and family.

Two of his wood-turned bowls—one cherry and one walnut—were selected for the exhibit. Working out of his Evanston studio, he trades for the wood with other artists throughout Chicago and the Midwest.

While adapting to the online format for his first-ever art show, Mah said he found that there are elements of his medium that can only be appreciated in person. “When you handle the bowl, there’s a certain chatoyance in the wood that you really can’t pick up in photographs,” he said. “But if you pick it up and turn it around in the light, different angles will bring out different qualities in the wood.”

“SLAYSIAN” also examines how artists can value their identity while refusing to be pigeonholed by it. Screenprinter Alex Kostiw said she was drawn to the exhibit’s open call because it did not specify that artists of Asian descent must discuss racial identity.

Kostiw’s prints focus on intergalactic communication between an observer on Earth and a space explorer, and implicitly question why an Asian American artist must explore Asia or America, and not the broader galaxy. Created during her time as an artist-in-residence at Sputnik Press in West Town, Kostiw’s prints uses celestial distance to explore “the particular language that develops between two people the longer they know each other—how certain words or phrases take on specific meaning.”

Kostiw compares the layers of screenprinting to words assembled into a sentence, with experimentation conducted through iterating and re-combining the layers. She hopes that the viewer’s “reading” experience is one that can continue at a distance in the midst of the pandemic.

“When you’re in person looking at the work, you have a chance to sort of let yourself sit with it in a space,” Kostiw said. “I think that’s something you can still achieve with a computer screen—hopefully you get to sit with it and let it sink in.”

A number of the artists selected for “SLAYSIAN” developed their relationships with art and with Chicago through

educational institutions including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago, and the University of Illinois system. Their work raises questions of what it means to inhabit spaces designed specifically for artists to grow, but where the Asian American experience may still be sidelined.

In her page on the online exhibit, Hmong American artist Tshab Her includes a photo of “Reclaiming Existence,” an installation she created as a student at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).

In the installation, Her painted the lobby of the UIC art building with a pattern borrowed from traditional Hmong clothing sewn by her grandmother. She hoped the bright colors of Hmong textiles would further highlight the invisibility of Hmong people in the U.S. “I created the work trying to claim a space, but since it’s not really our space, what does that look like? Over the semester, I sanded down the pattern so that it disappears…thinking about erasure, visibility, and invisibility for the Hmong body.”

As an artist whose work centers on the use of fabric and embroidery, Her worries that the digital exhibit may lose some of the craft’s detail. But she also hopes the online exhibit can provide a different kind of opportunity for visibility. “I’m always giving a historical context for people to understand the story of my work. So I think having it online, having it accessible—if people don’t know, I hope they do their own research if they’re not familiar with Hmong people,” Her said.

In addition to its role in educating and engaging with the broader Chicago community, much of “SLAYSIAN” reflects an inward-looking conversation among Asian Americans. Multiple artists wrote about their difficult choice to pursue art full-time, or revealed that they also hold a day job in a more “traditional” line of work, such as engineering or business. The act of pursuing their art grapples with internalized narratives about what is and is not possible for Asian Americans.

Within these narratives, the constraining forces of practicality and economic self-reliance are often represented by first-generation immigrant parents. For concert photographer Cindi Jean Zdrinc, her Taiwanese father’s impulse towards more conventional careers led her to originally study accounting. But she said that during a midterm her junior year, “I was looking down at these numbers and questions and

was like, ‘I don’t care about any of the stuff that’s on this paper and I have to do this for the rest of my life?’ So I got up from my midterm and I took my teacher out into the hallway and I told him, ‘I don’t think this is what I want to do with my life.’ They wished me luck, and I walked out of my midterm.”

She applied and was accepted to DePaul University’s film program, where a prerequisite class in photography sparked her career. “When I finally faced my dad about [pursuing art], it was the most anticlimactic experience ever. He was like, ‘OK’...” Zdrinc laughs. “It was actually a happy ending on that front. I was very surprised by the lack of concern.”

Since then, Zdrinc has built her career around capturing ephemeral moments from shows, concerts, and music festivals throughout the Chicago and Milwaukee areas. “It’s a very honored place to be,” Zdrinc said of being in a concert photo pit.

“I’m always having my one eye looking at the overall stage while I’m photographing with the other eye...just to make sure that I’m getting the most important or vibrant thing that’s going on.”

Zdrinc wanted the photos she submitted to represent a slice of the music world that many Asian Americans may not know of. “I thought having that passion displayed in the photos—capturing that essence of a live music environment—that just felt appropriate for such an exhibit that was called ‘SLAYSIAN.’” The title of the exhibit pays homage to an idea that originated in the LGBTQ community. To slay is to do something spectacularly well; it is to succeed overwhelmingly. The word implies an added flair that goes beyond technical excellence or expertise—it evokes all that a human can do to endow an action with personality.

“SLAYSIAN” embodies the aspiration that those at the outskirts of a society can redefine what success means for ourselves.

While Lam and the artists have been creating and building the online exhibit, the U.S. has witnessed a resurgence of antiAsian racism, renewed by the coronavirus pandemic. Over the roughly six-week period since the exhibit started, Asian American advocacy groups have collected more than 2,000 reports detailing incidents

JUNE 24, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

ARTS of harassment and discrimination related to what the president has led in calling the “Chinese virus.” As Hwang said, “We have people who think that Asian Americans are perpetual foreigners, [that] we are dirty and COVID-19 is another example of it.”

Hwang now sees “SLAYSIAN” as part of the work of building a counter-narrative.

“The show gives a pause to recognize who are the people that make up our society, [and] what we have been contributing all along,” she said.

In the face of anti-Asian racism, Lam sees the idea of narrative plenitude, coined

by Vietnamese American author Viet Thanh Nguyen, as one potential antidote to vitriol. Defining narrative plenitude as “an abundance of stories,” Lam highlights how the range and multitude of voices in “SLAYSIAN” can help to inoculate the public against any singular view of Asian Americans. “It just shows a different angle of our creativity and our resilience and our humanity. Just showing all these different stories humanizes us both as artists and also as Asian Americans.”

Narrative plenitude also includes the capacity for change. By allowing for a multitude of stories, Asian American artists can now practice a freedom long enjoyed by their white peers. Instead of being locked into one narrative as victim or immigrant, their art is allowed to grow with the times.

On June 4, nearly three months after “SLAYSIAN” was slated to open, Lam shared a new call for Chicago-area artists.

Originating from For the People Artist Collective, the call asks for “Asian artists who are available to create artwork around Asian-Black unity in response to anti-Black racism in our neighborhoods.”

While it is still uncertain whether an in-person “SLAYSIAN” will ever convene, the exhibition showcases the determination of individuals to find their own answers to what the role of an Asian American artist is. As they grapple with new questions, a whole new set of artworks will be created to continue the conversation. For now, the digital forum offers the opportunity for athome viewers to take part in this important work—to help these stories grow, evolve, and be seen. ¬

“SLAYSIAN” embodies the aspiration that those at the outskirts of a society can redefine what success means for ourselves."

“SLAYSIAN” is on view at artistsonthelam.com/slaysian.

Eileen Li grew up in Atlanta and attended the University of Chicago, where she was deputy news editor of the Chicago Maroon. This is her first contribution to the Weekly.

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"UNTITLED NO. 4 (MOTHS)", ALEX KOSTIW

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HOUSING

The Promises and Pitfalls of ADUs Residents and activists discuss what legalizing accessory dwelling units could really mean for the fight over equitable and affordable housing

BY DAVID ZEGEYE

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grew up in a garden unit on an African and Caribbean block of Rogers Park. As a kid, my block felt alive. The Jamaican elders would give me life advice as I greeted them, Nigerian parties would take over the apartments above us, and the smell of my family’s Ethiopian cooking would make our neighbors wish they could join our home for dinner.

Although our rent was cheaper than our neighbors, we had the largest apartment in the building. Having a space that we could call our own for family gatherings, mournings, and celebrations gave my family a sense of pride and comfort. Just as diverse as the cultural backgrounds of the residents, the buildings on my block were a mixture of four-flats, courtyards, rowhomes, and classic bungalows. If I wanted to admire Chicago architecture, I just had to step outside of my apartment. More importantly, though, I was happy to have a home.

The garden unit I grew up in is unfortunately considered illegal across many parts of Chicago. These forms of housing, along with other accessory dwelling units (ADUs) such as coach houses and attic units, have long been a part of the city’s urban fabric. Their smaller size have helped them serve as naturally occurring forms of affordable housing. As rents have been rising in Hyde Park, I now live in a coach house built in the early 1900s because it is one of the few apartments I can afford.

ADUs have been banned since the 1950s due to fears of overcrowding.

Unfortunately, the more recent trend of housing loss has exacerbated the practice of unpermitted units across the city. This has been particularly true in Pilsen and Little Village, where residents who need affordable rent have to live with safety concerns and fears of getting evicted by city inspectors.

There has been a citywide push to re-allow 20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JUNE 24, 2020

ADUs as a way to increase the affordable housing stock. An ordinance was introduced to City Council last month proposing that ADUs be allowed as-of-right across most of Chicago.

Department of Housing (DOH) and Department of Planning and Development (DPD) commissioners Marisa Novara and Maurice Cox spoke at the 11th Annual Woodlawn Community Summit in early March about how ADUs could benefit Woodlawn. As the Obama Presidential Center has been driving concerns around gentrification and housing prices, they discussed ADUs as an “incremental way to gently insert density” while increasing affordability in the neighborhood.

However, the definition of affordability is relative, and the price of new units is not guaranteed to be affordable to residents in different parts of the city. The city’s ADU ordinance would require that half of converted basement and attic units are affordable to residents making sixty percent of the area median income (AMI), which ranges from $38,000 to $72,000, depending on family size. While this would be affordable to a household in Lakeview, these rates would be unaffordable to most households in Woodlawn, since sixty percent of citywide AMI is significantly higher than the neighborhood’s median income.

Much of the discussion around ADUs has focused on legalizing and constructing them, with little discussion of their impact on (and potential for) the South Side. 35th Ward Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa has even argued that ADUs should be referred to more colloquially as coach houses or garden apartments, to better reach residents.

In turn, I interviewed local residents and community leaders across the South Side so they could share their thoughts on the matter.

“As far as we know now, there’s a deficit of 182,000 units. We’re not gonna get there by opening up basements and coach houses.”

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met with Jawanza Malone, Bronzeville resident and executive director of the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), a grassroots organization that advocates for low-income and working families. Jawanza has fought for affordable housing for low-income residents and is familiar with ADUs both in concept and in practice.

Jawanza discussed how ADUs already exist on the South Side, though they are banned in most neighborhoods due to zoning limits. “People are already living in illegal basements, illegal coach houses, because people need somewhere to live, and that’s what has been available at affordable rents because people knew they were illegal.”

Jawanza mentioned the possibility that even if ADUs were legalized across the city, landlords would still offer them at lower quality than other units. “What happens when we have substandard conditions we’re asking people to live in? It seems like it creates more problems than it actually solves.

I don’t think that’s the way for us to go.”

Jawanza expressed skepticism that ADUs will be affordable for low-income Black residents. “The idea, also, that we’re gonna have this watershed moment in terms of providing housing for people by opening us the basement units and coach houses is just ridiculous. As far as we know now, there’s a deficit of 182,000 units. We’re not

gonna get there by opening up basements and coach houses.” He argued that because real estate interests have marketed ADUs as affordable options for cities across the country, affordable housing activists are gaslighted into supporting them if they vocalize their concerns or opposition.

As we continued talking, we got to the discussion of gentrification across the mid-South Side. Over forty percent of residents make less than $25,000 in the area, while much of the new construction is for homes being sold over $500,000. Jawanza expressed concern that renovations which add ADUs, or bring unpermitted ones up to code, would not mitigate the displacement of low-income Black residents, since if ADUs became legal, landlords could charge pre-existing units the same rent as other apartments in the building.

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shley is a recent college graduate from Englewood and has lived across different parts of the community. Her family now lives in a twoflat, a staple of the neighborhood’s housing stock, with a garden unit and a coach house in the rear.

Chicago’s DOH sees ADUs as a way for “multi-generational households to remain close” while reducing crowding. Now that she has graduated, Ashley has been wanting her own space to continue her studies. The

DEVELOPMENT

coach house was rented to her cousin while he was looking for his own place to move and continue his work. To her, moving to one of the other units in the building would be appealing—though she has some concerns. “I don’t want to see people every day. But, I mean, if something goes on [in the other units] I can go upstairs, so I don’t think it would be a problem,” she said.

Many two-flats across Englewood have existing basements that can be adapted into housing. Ashley imagines that the renovated garden units in the community would remain affordable for residents—though she is concerned that newly constructed ADUs would be just as pricey as new units in other parts of the city.

Although housing in the area costs less than in other communities, many Englewood residents are rent-burdened.

This issue continues as past home building programs in the neighborhood, despite being designated as affordable, have given subsidies to homebuyers making up to $100,000—almost five times higher than Englewood’s median income.

Ashley is concerned that white residents migrating to the South Side, who won’t build relationships with the community, would be the ones predominately living in new units. I asked how new ADUs can prioritize support of existing Black residents. “I think they should be affordable, because if you think about it, with gentrification and the stuff going on, you want Black people in the community. And so you want [ADUs] to be affordable for them, at least maybe initially, because there’s a lot of low-income folks.”

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bonée Green is a South Shore resident and a member of the Obama Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) Coalition, where she has been involved with ensuring that her community is not displaced from the construction of the Obama Presidential Center. A fall 2019 study from the University of Illinois at Chicago showed that within two miles of the planned Obama Center, rent in new constructions and renovations are continuing to rise, with evidence suggesting that “landlords are charging higher rents to new tenants compared to longer term tenants.” South Shore, which already has the city’s highest eviction rate, is at risk of losing many low-income residents to displacement.

Ebonée’s first experience living in an ADU was a garden unit in Uptown that was poorly maintained, to the point where the landlord had covered up decaying

floorboards with carpet. “All of our stuff got covered in mold, and I actually still have a mold allergy from it,” she said.

Although the experience gave her a bias against garden units, Ebonée now lives in a condo-quality 2-bedroom garden unit in South Shore, which she describes as the nicest apartment she has lived in Chicago.

The apartment has new hardwood floors, insulated walls, and naturally lit rooms for $1,250 a month. While her rent is cheaper than other apartments in the building, it is higher than that of other places she had previously rented in South Shore, as well as the 3-bedroom I grew up in Rogers Park.

Ebonée expressed concern that even lowermiddle class residents may not be able to afford new ADUs if they are legalized in South Shore.

When asked about opening the city to ADUs and expanding the inventory of housing options, Ebonée said she is supportive of the idea but thinks it won’t immediately address affordability. “I don’t think that’s wrong thinking, but I do think that it’s gonna require a lot more oversight and it should not work around affordable housing.” She said South Shore’s immediate priority should be ensuring that new construction due to the Obama Center is affordable to residents. ADUs could help if they were legislated to benefit low-income Black residents—rather than relying on market demand to determine their rent.

We each shared our own experiences— positive and negative—with living in a garden unit, and started discussing the implications of designating them as affordable units. “There’s something about putting affordable units in the garden, and forcing people underground, [that] just feels not right,” Ebonée brought up.

She’s fortunate enough that her apartment receives enough natural light and has tall ceilings, but many older ADUs were not built with similar amenities. “Most of the poor people in Chicago, not all, are Black already and just to add that extra kind of psychological and physical health thing to it is messed up.” David Zegeye is an astrophysics graduate student at the University of Chicago and a freelance writer for Streetsblog Chicago and Cityscape Chicago. To David, pondering what is beyond our skies is deeply connected to understanding the history of our land. He focuses on writing about the inequity in the city's affordable housing and transit systems.

This is his first piece for the Weekly.

The Final Piece of Saint Anthony’s Puzzle Competing interests fight for one empty La Villita lot

BY JOSEPHINE WANG

T

ime and time again, over the last several years, the fate of the vacant lot at the southwest corner of 31st Street and Kedzie Ave. in La Villita has seemed all but certain. The former site of the Washburne Trade School, the lot has stood empty since 2009, accruing dust and debris.

For nearly a decade, executives at Saint Anthony Hospital, located just a few blocks northwest in nearby North Lawndale, have been lobbying city and state officials to grant them the lot, as well as millions in funding, to develop a mixed-use project featuring a new hospital, businesses, and recreation areas under the name of Focal Point Community Campus.

Despite their success in securing support from high profile politicians, obtaining some community buy-in, and even negotiating the sale of the lot for $1, the Focal Point project remained in stasis.

When the Chicago Board of Education, which owns the lot, announced a bidding period last summer, it sat on proposals for months while keeping applicants in the dark.

An internal email obtained by the Weekly showed that by February the situation had become dire: Saint Anthony executives were contemplating suing the city over the lot and closing down the hospital if all else failed.

Earlier this month, spokespeople for the city and Saint Anthony told the Weekly that they are in negotiations over developing the lot, though no further details were given. Yet uncertainty permeates the project—from its protracted timeline, to

the hospital’s financial woes in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, to various other obstacles Saint Anthony executives must face before construction even begins. A local group’s objections to the development, their counter-proposal, and the lot’s continued vacancy in the middle of one of the city’s busiest arteries, shows just how complicated development can be in Chicago’s marginalized communities.

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aint Anthony sits on the southern edge of Douglas Park, where its employees have served nearby communities out of the same building for more than 125 years. It is a safety net hospital, meaning individuals can obtain access to health services regardless of their insurance or ability to pay. Most of its patients come from La Villita and North Lawndale, in addition to Pilsen, Brighton Park, and other neighborhoods with large populations of low-income people of color—who are often dealing with environmental pollutants and other health hazards.

Illinois’s safety net hospitals have more Medicaid, charity, and self-pay patients than other hospitals. Consequently, they are more reliant on government funding and are often financially challenged. In 2007, Guy Medaglia, a business consultant, came to Saint Anthony to manage the hospital for eight weeks through a critical financial period. Medaglia decided to stay on as the president and CEO, and the hospital, after cutting ties with healthcare group Ascension in 2009, has managed to stay afloat and even JUNE 24, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

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post net positive revenue in years since.

But there were problems with the building. It had been designed for how medicine was practiced in the nineteenth century, and maintenance was expensive.

According to Jim Sifuentes, Saint Anthony’s vice president of mission and community development, the idea for Focal Point came from former Mayor Richard M. Daley. “In his last year, he visited Saint Anthony [for the first time]. He said, ‘I have eleven acres … I want to give you that. I want you to build a new hospital,’” referring to the old Washburne lot. Medaglia thanked Daley for the offer, but pointed out that the hospital didn’t have the needed funds. “And the mayor said, ‘Well, I want you to build one. I want you to figure out how to do that.’”

Saint Anthony began working with HDR Architecture, a design firm specializing in architecture and construction services, to conduct a survey in La Villita and surrounding communities. The surveys found there was interest in a range of

services. In addition to hospital services, survey participants wanted park space and retail options.

Drawing from these surveys, Focal Point was envisioned as a mixed-use development in which hospital services would be available alongside parks, retail, childcare, and more, to address the various needs of the community. “We hear for spaces to host events, graduations, quinceañeras… business incubators” Sifuentes said.

If developed as planned, Focal Point would not only provide Saint Anthony with a new hospital building, but also address some of the other issues facing La Villita, as reflected by a 2013 report from Enlace Chicago, a community development nonprofit. The report found that a lack of open spaces in La Villita contributed to neighborhood violence, as it left “youth without safe access to positive activities among friends, or with family.”

Compounding these difficulties is the fact that many in the community are inhibited

by low wages and a scarcity of meaningful, quality jobs. Focal Point, with its plan for a park, businesses, and athletic fields, could address both.

The project would also be financially self-sustaining—or so Saint Anthony executives hoped. As the project has expanded, the expected costs of Focal Point have steadily increased, from $250 million at its conception in 2010, to the most recent estimate, which came in at just under $600 million. Public money and grants were expected to help cover initial costs, but rent from Focal Point’s tenants, of which the hospital would be one, would sustain the project and the hospital in the long term.

Once Saint Anthony finished relocating to the La Villita location, the old building in North Lawndale would likely be given over to the Park District, as an extension of Douglas Park, or be converted to senior housing, according to Sifuentes.

In 2012, Medaglia started the Chicago Southwest Development Corporation

(CSDC), a nonprofit tasked with envisioning what the Focal Point project would look like, lobbying for land and funding, and eventually developing and maintaining the campus and foundation.

Since its founding, CSDC has bought up much of the land around the Washburne lot. According to property records, in 2014, CSDC took out a $1.15 million loan from the Saint Anthony Hospital Foundation to buy a property south of the lot. In 2017, CSDC acquired Action Metal and Iron Inc., which covered lots to the west and southwest, and in 2018, CSDC obtained Azteca Mall, just south of the lot, with the city’s help. All together, CSDC owns more than 900,000 square feet surrounding the lot, or just shy of twenty-one acres. The Washburne site sits at the corner of all of that land, the last piece in a multi-million-dollar puzzle.

Saint Anthony executives were also busy garnering the support of powerful politicians like Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy IMAGE COURTESY OF FOCAL POINT CHICAGO

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DEVELOPMENT

Duckworth, Congressmen Chuy Garcia and Danny Davis, and nearby aldermen.

“Focal Point is a game changer for Chicago’s West and Southwest side communities,” said Durbin. “The campus will be the first of its kind and can serve as a model for community development across the nation.”

Between 2014 and 2017, CSDC was on the brink of acquiring the lot several times.

In 2014, the city council voted to sell the lot to CSDC for $1 if CSDC met several requirements, including demonstrating that it had secured eighty percent of the funds for the project. Again, in 2017, the Community Development Commission (CDC) voted in favor of a measure to sell the property to CSDC, again for $1.

But the lot remained unsold and undeveloped, most likely because CSDC wasn’t able to secure enough funding. In a statement to the Weekly, a spokesperson for Saint. Anthony said that “the conditions for the sale of land have evolved with each mayoral administration” and that financial institutions could not “close on project financing” because CSDC did not have title to all the property—apparently a kind of catch-22. When pressed by CDC members and journalists in 2017 over how much funding had been secured, CSDC representatives did not say.

To fund the project, CSDC planned to take on $175 million in debt and obtain financial assistance from the state and federal government. In the 2017 CDC meeting, a CSDC representative stated that they anticipated receiving $50 million in federal funds for the project, while former state senator Martin Sandoval called for $80 million from the state government to help fund the project.

Another obstacle was that the land required environmental remediation due to industrial pollution. In 2018, the Environmental Protection Agency awarded the CSDC a $200,000 grant to clean up the land. But CSDC can’t start until it has rights to the property, and according to the spokesperson, CSDC can’t “clos[e] on financing” until the remediation is done.

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tarting around 2018, a competitor entered the picture: Cinespace Chicago Film Studio, the second largest television and movie studio in the country. Cinespace, which is located just a couple blocks east of Saint Anthony in North Lawndale, bought Crown Steel in 2018 for $2.8 million, a property just west of the Washburne site. Cinespace had plans

to build another studio, but needed the Washburne lot to complete the project.

Cinespace had close ties with the Emanuel administration and other Chicago power players. In 2016, its president, Alexander Pissios, cooperated with the FBI to help bring down Chicago Teamsters union boss John Coli for extortion. Since then, as the Sun-Times as shown, Pissios had $1 million in debt disappear and Cinespace was able to buy several properties from the Emanuel administration within a couplemile radius of its studio, including a $74 million development deal with the Chicago Housing Authority, of which $4 million in fees would go to Pissios and his partners.

But the main frustration for La Villita residents is that Cinespace took ownership of public streets near their current location and blocked residents from walking, driving or biking through their regular routes to work or school.

Despite the years Saint Anthony executives spent trying to obtain the land, “Pissios’ plan...seemed to gain footing with Emanuel in office,'' according to the SunTimes. Saint Anthony’s spokesperson told the Weekly that Emanuel’s administration “posed many more obstacles” to getting the land than those of Daley or Lori Lightfoot.

In 2019, the Chicago Board of Education opened the possibility of acquiring the lot to the public and announced that it would be accepting development proposals.

Both Saint Anthony and Cinespace submitted their plans and presented them to local residents at the first public meeting concerning the future of the lot, which 22nd Ward Alderman Michael Rodriguez organized on August 22. Rodriguez, whose ward includes the lot and who had voiced support for Focal Point back when he was still director at Enlace, seemed amenable to both proposals. “They both have a significant number of…high paying jobs for working class people,” Rodriguez said in an interview with the Weekly. “We’re talking about, essentially, two industries that are a hospital and the film industry, that are both productive industries for working class people to go and get union jobs.”

In the end, the Board sat on the proposals for nearly six months, without updates, until December when, according to Saint Anthony’s spokesperson, they announced that they would not be awarding the land to either bidder.

In February, Medaglia sent an email to Saint Anthony employees with an update on the Focal Point project. After claiming that

"Focal Point was envisioned as a mixed-use development in which hospital services would be available alongside parks, retail, childcare, and more, to address the various needs of the community." “the Emanuel administration stopped the project by directing the Board of Education to end the bid process for the last piece of property,” Medaglia stated that if they could not get their hands on the Washburne site, “Saint Anthony will most likely have to close. This would deprive a poor area of a great hospital and the much-needed health care it provides.”

Medaglia went on to say that he had hired Michael Shakman, “a Chicago lawyer who has brought legal action against the City in the past,” (he’s the lawyer behind the Shakman Decrees, the federal court orders limiting patronage in city hiring) to “open a dialogue” with Lightfoot’s administration.

If the administration rebuffed the advance, “he and his firm have been authorized to sue the City in federal court to obtain the Washburne property.”

Saint Anthony’s spokesperson acknowledged that Medaglia had sent the email, but claimed that “there has never been anything mentioned about the hospital closing...We did start that dialogue and have since been communicating with the City.”

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Cinespace stated that “CPS returned the earnest money from the bidding process for the vacant lot...some time ago. It is the understanding of Cinespace that the property is no longer available. If the property becomes available again, we intend to explore it as an option for studio expansion.”

A

t the August 22 meeting, Saint Anthony and Cinespace were not the only entities to present a plan for the old Washburne site. Some La Villita residents, who loosely collect under the name ‘Mi Villita,’ came to voice their opposition to both proposals. They want the city to keep the land and use it for public good.

Howard Ehrman, the group’s progenitor and long-time La Villita resident, worries the developments could accelerate gentrification. “That’s why we oppose it primarily,” he said. “We think that public lands should remain public. It shouldn’t be turned over” to a development that he described as a “real estate project primarily, a hospital secondarily.”

Long-time resident and Mi Villita volunteer Dolores Castañeda agreed. “We want something [that] is for, and belongs to, the community. Everything built on that land should come from community voices,” she said.

Ehrman and others of Mi Villita want the city to build a new vocational school at the site, one that would be “fit for the twenty-first century.” In a press release from last September, Mi Villita outlined a school that might provide training in “traditional trades and twenty-first-century trades” for “renewable energy, information technology, health care, construction, architecture, manufacturing, urban agriculture, electrician, carpenter, plumbing, heating and air conditioning.” In addition, they cited a need for a comprehensive arts program, which is noted to be “lacking in CPS HS [Chicago Public School high schools], especially for Students of Color on the South and West Sides.”

Mi Villita’s proposal, though lacking the financial and organizational support of Saint Anthony and Cinespace, harkens back to the lot’s previous tenant, the Washburne Trade School, itself a microcosm of Chicago’s history.

Established in 1919 as the Washburne Trade and Continuance school, it had support from many powerful unions. The school moved to a former liquid carbonic factory at 31st and Kedzie in the 1930s. In addition to instruction by up to seventeen different unions and a physical plant for JUNE 24, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23

DEVELOPMENT

“Ehrman and others of Mi Villita want the city to build a new vocational school at the site, one that would be ‘fit for the twenty-first century.’”

training in manufacturing and service trades, students who graduated from Washburne received union apprenticeship cards.

“Washburne played a vital role in regulating the training and supply of skilled laborers into the building trades,” wrote researcher David L. Green in the 1992 Urban Review.

But Washburne wasn’t open to everyone.

Its students were all white and majority male.

“Unfortunately, this success story between business unionism and soft-line capitalism served also to reinforce the practice of racial exclusionism in most of the building trade unions,” wrote Green. “The unions were able to continue their exclusionary policies with the implicit sanction of the officials of Washburne, the Chicago Public Schools, and the federal government.”

As Washburne eventually integrated non-white and female students around the 1960s, many building trade unions stopped participating in the programs. In 1965, there were seventeen unions in the school; by 1978, there were eight, and by 1993, just two unions remained. Along with the withdrawal of capital from the inner city by business, industrial, and financial institutions (also known as structural disinvestment) and into the suburbs, the country’s manufacturing base saw a general decline.

The school closed in 1993, reopening a year later under the City College system, before closing for good in 1996. The hulking buildings were then demolished between 2008-2009, and the land has since functioned as an unofficial dumping site.

“What we’re asking CPS to do is not sell the land to anybody,” Ehrman said.

“Because this particular piece of land is four blocks from the geographic center of the city, which is around California and 31st, we think it’s prime territory to not just build a 24 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JUNE 24, 2020

vocational high school, but to think about other public projects.”

Sifuentes, the vice president at Saint Anthony, claimed that Focal Point wouldn’t bring on gentrification. “We actually want to make sure that we’re part of stabilizing [the] community,” he said. Sifuentes added that the retail portion would help the project be successful, but that it wouldn’t compete with local businesses. “It’s retail that’s not going to affect Little Village, 26th Street. In fact, it's retail that people go to Cicero and North Riverside for—those commodities.

We would bring it closer to the community.”

Rodriguez thinks development from either of the projects is the best path forward for the neighborhood. “I think whenever you do development, you have to weigh the fact that we have communities like Little Village, who have historically been disinvested in,” he said. Through these projects, “we have an opportunity to do something really positive for our neighborhood and our community.”

According to Rodriguez, both development projects have verbally agreed to community benefits agreements.

But some Mi Villita members object to the idea of ceding public land, as well as public funds, to private interests. And others, like long-time resident Lacourdaire Camargo, find the current confluence of public and private entities suspect.

“We know that its public record that the newly elected alderman in the ward has received campaign contributions from the lobbying group [Roosevelt Group with Victor Reyes] that is looking to secure or helping to secure financing for this project,” said Carmago. “And we know that employees from the hospital have also been giving campaign contributions to the alderman, in addition to the lobbying group

and the CEO of the hospital.”

The Roosevelt Group, Reyes Kurson (Victor Reyes’s firm), Sifuentes, and Medaglia have given campaign contributions amounting to about $4,700 total, with amounts ranging from $200 to $1,500. (Victor Reyes was infamously recorded by the FBI in 2019, in discussion with former Alderman Danny Solis, asking for the alderman to send over business.)

Rodriguez denies any undue influence as a result of the donations. “I’m very proud of the limits that I’ve put on myself as far as accepting donations from developers,” he said. “And I will continue to be a progressive champion for campaign finance reform. I think that we need that. So that big corporations can’t control their elected officials.”

T

he COVID-19 pandemic has created another layer of challenges for Saint Anthony and introduced another level of uncertainty, as the Weekly reported last month. The hospital has been spending more to respond to the pandemic while cutting elective surgeries and other procedures that usually bring in income.

Meanwhile, Saint Anthony has not been receiving as much federal assistance because it doesn’t have as many patients on Medicare, one of the factors used in the CARES act to determine how stimulus money is distributed to providers. Between March and April, the hospital lost $10 million, according to a Business Insider article that profiled Saint Anthony and other hospitals that were struggling financially under the pandemic.

Saint Anthony was facing financial problems even before the pandemic.

Hospital officials claim that the state has

repeatedly been late with reimbursing Medicaid payments and that as of May, the state owed them $22 million since midFebruary. In response, Saint Anthony sued the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services in an attempt to recoup some of that money.

It’s also unclear how the pandemic will affect state and city governments in the coming year, and whether there will be funds for large capital projects like Focal Point.

When asked about whether hospital officials were still expecting to receive federal and state funds, the Saint Anthony spokesperson wrote “We can’t know how Springfield will be distributing funds throughout the state.

Our focus remains on acquiring funding through traditional lending sources, private investment and philanthropy.”

The spokesperson also argued that the pandemic had “magnified health disparities” and showed why “lower income communities need access to the same quality health care and wellness services that more affluent communities typically have...The pandemic should encourage all stakeholders, including the City of Chicago, to move expeditiously to help CSDC secure the support needed to move the project forward.”

For now, the eleven acres remain only as the site of grand projections and dreams.

Stuck in bureaucratic and public health purgatory, the La Villita community, maybe split in opinion, is united in their fight for communal input. Adam Przybyl contributed to this story.

Josephine Wang is a writer from Chicago. This is her first piece for the Weekly.

South Side Statues & Monument Trivia

By Martha Bayne

1) A massive statue of what slave-owning U.S. president sits just inside his namesake park at 55th and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive?

2) The sculptor of this “Golden Lady” in Jackson Park went on to fame as the creator of the monumental tribute to Abraham Lincoln that anchors one end of the Mall in Washington, D.C.

2020 South Side Weekly Student Essay Contest Deadline Extended to July 6th Grades 6-12

3) This Bronzeville sculpture (at 26th and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) honors the more than six million Black people who came north to Chicago in search of work between 1910 and 1970.

4) This abstract bronze work by Henry Moore marks the spot on the University of Chicago campus where Enrico Fermi oversaw the world’s first controlled atomic reaction in 1942.

5) The statue honoring this Mexican leader is on the Magnificent Mile, but the Pilsen high school bearing his name is itself a tribute to Mexican culture and leaders.

6) In the wake of the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 a bust of what Civil War-era leader was vandalized in Englewood?

7) This monument to one of Chicago’s “founding fathers” sits on Damen just north of the South Branch of the Chicago River, at the unceremonious entrance to a wholesale grocer’s warehouse.

8) Located in Oak Woods Cemetery, in Greater Grand Crossing, this hotly contested monument marks a mass grave and is dedicated to Confederate prisoners of war who died at Chicago’s Camp Douglas during the Civil War. 9) It’s not a statue, but this terracotta and ceramic tile installation at the northern edge of Marquette Park is a contemplative monument to a key civil rights leader, installed fifty years after he led a historic march through the surrounding neighborhood.

What do you mean when you say Chicago?

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REDUCED TO $465,000 VINTAGE 5 BEDROOM CONDOMINIUM WITH GARAGE AND TWO BALCONIES

LISTED AT $2,200,000 SIXTEEN ROOM FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT HELLER HOUSE WITH 2-CAR GARAGE

1019 E HYDE PARK BLVD #1 5132 SOUTH WOODLAWN AVENUE This beautiful house, with high ceilings & huge kitchen with 4 pantries, differs from later Wright houses. A National Landmark treasure, the house is in fabulous condition and has 7 bedrooms, magnificent oak floors, enormous closets, stained glass windows, 4 fireplaces, new 2-zoned heating & cooling & a newly renovated elevator that services all floors. The third floor can be used as a separate 2 bedroom apartment. On a 75x165 lot, the house has a 2 car garage.

This exquisitely renovated, period inspired 5 bedroom condominium offers 3000 sq. ft. of gracious living space.

Hardwood floors throughout, updated bathrooms, original built-ins, French doors, a formal dining room and a professionally designed kitchen. Both front and rear balconies, a garage and in-unit laundry. Brand new 10,000 & 8,000 BTU air conditioners.

CO N TAC T U S AT 3 1 2 . 3 37. 24 0 0

4th ANNUAL

Bungalow Garden Contest!

7 ENTER BY JULY BEFORE NOON

LET’S SHOW OFF THOSE SOUTH SIDE GARDENS! Across the city, Chicago bungalow owners demonstrate their love for nature by beautifying their blocks with inspiring home gardens.

The Bungalow Garden Contest aims to celebrate your hard work, and draw attention to how gardens not only enhance a home’s architecture, but can also uplift a community. Winners receive: $250 cash prize, gift certificate to local garden center, free garden consultation, personalized award plaque, and more!

This year, for every eligible garden contest entry we receive, $25 will be donated to South and West Side Chicago community gardens. (Do you know a community garden that could benefit? Email apauldine@chicagobungalow.org)

MORE INFO www.chicagobungalow.org/garden-contest

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The U.S. Census happens only every 10 years. It counts everyone in the United States and uses that information to determine how many members of Congress represent your community and how federal funds are spent. Completing the census is one more way we can help each other. When you fill out the census, you help amplify your community voice and ensure federal funds go to critical services like schools, libraries, nutrition and health programs, roads and much more.

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